Russians are being sent to die in daily ‘meat grinder’. The tactic works

Every morning follows the same grim routine along the stretch of the eastern front that Andriy and his company defend. At 3am he wakes in his dugout and goes to rouse his soldiers. He then carries out checks on their ammunition supplies and, if there is still time, has something to eat before the start of another enemy raid at dawn.

Smoke is always the harbinger, an attempt by the Russians to obscure the charge of infantrymen and armoured vehicles. Their objective is to traverse the 300 metres of moon-like terrain that separates the two armies positioned among opposing tree lines.

But rarely do they make it to Ukrainian lines. By the time the sun has risen at 6am the skirmish is over and no man’s land is once again a morass of dead Russians and crumpled machinery.

“Their tactics are primitive,” the 24-year-old lieutenant said as he prepared to bed down for the night in a hollow among the trees, knowing that in a few hours it would all begin anew. “But they’re relentless.”

The term “meat grinder” has become a byword for Russia’s military strategy in its campaign to seize Donbas. But even by the standards of this most attritional of wars, the past few months have been unprecedented in the scale of human loss that the Kremlin has been willing to countenance for the sake of incremental territory gains.

According to US intelligence, August and September were their bloodiest months of the war so far, with more than 1,200 Russians killed and wounded each day. It is thought that Russia is stepping up its attacks now, before the onset of winter, when muddy conditions and a lack of tree cover will make both infantry and armoured assaults more difficult.

Andriy, a paratrooper with one of the airborne brigades defending the line outside Kurakhove, a town in the Donetsk region, estimates that between 20 and 30 Russians are killed during each of their daily sallies on his company’s position, falling under a hail of machinegun fire and shelling.

Suicidal though it may be, the strategy is not without effect. In the past two months Russia gained territory at a pace not seen since 2022, with 318 square miles captured in that time, according to the open-source intelligence organisation Black Bird Group.

“The people they send over in these raids are not real fighting units and are badly trained,” said Andriy, a professional soldier from Kyiv who joined the army in 2021 and is now deputy commander of his company. “But still, it depletes our munition supplies and each time one of our guys is either wounded or killed.

“Sometimes one of them will make it across to our side and hide within the tree line. We then have to spend the rest of the day looking for them — and then liquidating them. Again, the whole purpose of this is to sap our resources and divert our attention. It’s crude, but it works. Two weeks ago they managed to advance 500 metres.”

Kurakhove, where Andriy’s brigade has been since January, is the site of the heaviest fighting across the entirety of the 600-mile front. A third of all reported Russian offensive action in recent days took place around the town, Ukraine’s general staff said at the weekend.

An important energy and logistics hub, Kurakhove is 35 miles to the south of Pokrovsk, which has also come under sustained attack since the summer. The capture of both towns would provide the platform required to advance on the rest of Donetsk region, roughly a third of which Ukraine still controls.

Kurakhove is slowly being razed to the ground by Russian strikes. About 70 per cent of all buildings are now either destroyed or damaged, according to the local administration.

Collaborators are also a concern. About 1,000 people out of an original population of 20,000 have chosen to stay. “Nearly all of the local people I have met are supportive of us,” said Nazar Voytenkov, 23, a press officer for the 79th brigade. “But we are having to move our positions constantly because there are some who are giving co-ordinates to the Russians.”

As is the case everywhere, both munitions and manpower are in short supply. However, a mobilisation drive at the start of this year resulted in about 200 conscripts joining the 79th brigade over the summer and early autumn in four batches.

Nearly all are over the age of 35. Some are drunks, some are arthritic. “And they don’t want to be here either,” said a 56-year-old sergeant with the call sign Kuznets, who is responsible for whipping the conscripts into shape. “They’re not motivated like the guys who volunteered to fight. The supply of those guys dried up in 2023,” he added.

On the battlefield their basic training is of little use, he says, as much of it is based on a theory of warfare developed by Nato members decades ago when first-person view drones and glide bombs had yet to be invented.

They are, for example, taught to move while looking down the barrel of their rifle, Kuznets says — effective for fighting in a city but not here, where there are mines everywhere underfoot.

Kuznets himself knows well the danger of explosives, having very nearly been killed by a tank round while fighting in the city of Severodonetsk in the summer of 2022. He was left with severe concussion. To this day he still suffers from memory loss and blurred vision.

“I try never to let those problems show,” he said stiffly as artillery fire resounded all around. “As a sergeant you must be a man of steel to your soldiers.” In the weeks and months ahead, they will all need to be.

Additional reporting by Vika Sybir